Film Carew: Blackfish, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, After May

BLACKFISH

Gabriela Cowperthwaite's documentary, Blackfish, is an exploration - or, moreso, an evisceration - of the All-American 'marine show' industry, in which captive orcas are turned into performing pets in a perversion of nature. It's posed as an investigation into the 2010 death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau - the third 'accidental' death involving the one whale, Tilikum - but this is, really, just the hook. Like a thoughtful procedural, the further Cowperthwaite investigates, the more the story pulls out to a big-picture view. It's not just a familiar tale of corporate crooks, caring little about the welfare of their employees, animals, the environment, etc; happy to blame a trainer for her own death so as not to disturb the bottom line. Instead, it's a profound portrait of the orcas themselves: about the behind-the-scenes lives of those marine show stars; and, of course, about the moral responsibility - reprehensibility - of turning wild mammals into performing pets in a perversion of nature.

In the wild, there's no record of orcas attacking humans; for humans, the name 'killer whale' is a titular misnomer for these overgrown dolphins. Blackfish's procedural wonders, then, what could turn an orca into a killer; and traces back their scarred psychological states to the childhood trauma of being stolen from their tightly-bonded families. After that, a lifetime in captivity makes the whales sick, depressed, temperamental, and sometimes aggressive. These are, at best, a series of inconvenient truths; even if perky SeaWorld mouthpieces are happy to paper them over with nicer lies. Cowperthwaite is obviously agitating for social change - hoping marine parks go the way of performing-animal circuses - but seeing the cabal of high-priced lawyers exiting court after the conclusion of hearings on Brancheau's death, it's clear that, as fine a work as Blackfish is, no amount of negative press will be able to harm an industry so wealthy. Yet, even if its social influence may be limited, the documentary has already has a cinematic influence: Pixar rewrote the ending to its forthcoming Finding Nemo sequel, deciding that finishing up in a marine-park isn't a happy ending after all.

AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS

David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints shows him as graduate of the school of Terrence Malick. A tale of star-crossed lovers from Texan backwoods badlands, it's shot at perpetual dusk, with sunlight bleeding into the lens and making hair glow. The hair belongs to Rooney Mara, loose strands of it forever dancing in the wind; Lowery's camera drawing close to her, lingering on her fake bad teeth. Here, the starlet's skeletal form works in service of her character; a former Bonnie to Casey Affleck's Clyde, who holds out in a tiny Texas town, waiting for her man to break out of prison. Lowery's last film, the title-seen St. Nick, followed two siblings on the lam in the woods, a piece of rural naturalism that returned man to environment. Ain't Them Bodies Saints doesn't make the same commitment, but Lowery's clearly at home in field and pasture, in abandoned shacks and dirty ditches, following an escaped Affleck as he attempts to elude capture and - emotional lure alert! - be reunited with his sweetheart, and meet the nearly-four-year-old daughter he ain't yet seen.

Most of the story's emotions, and its drama, are tied up in the letters Affleck sends home; which are read in a voice-over lingering with Malickian poetry. The characters are all taciturn, hardened by hard lives in the rural South; but their monosyllabic grunts - Ben Foster does fine work as the friendly ginger cop, whose words are barely-audible mumbles emanating from somewhere deep in his moustache - fade away once the film moves into voice-over mode; his letters providing Lowery able opportunity to move into artful montage. Affleck's character is a storyteller; prone to tall tales, mythologising his life as he goes, and that gives his flight - and invariable demise - a charmed quality. Dramatically, it's not the most inspired tale; especially once the Evil Bounty Hunters show up, and you know people are about to get shot. But it's a beautiful-looking film, with a charmingly handclap-splattered score from Daniel Hart, and, it must be said, a seriously great title. Lowery leans on the altar of Malick, but he's not just a stylist aping a look; Ain't Them Bodies Saints strikes the right tragic-romantic tone, managing to feel both doomed and hopeful.

AFTER MAY

Though it was named, terribly, Something In The Air for its English-language release, After May's seemingly-banal literally-translated title evokes its unhurried drama. The latest film for Olivier Assayas is a portrait of idealist young May-'68ers that starts with a barrage of domestic dissidence, in which beatnik teens turn mobilised political force. But its drama is concerned not with the epoch, but its aftermath; at what happens to idealism when protests don't bring about change. The story is hitched to Clement Meyer, a budding artist who escapes the police in the aftermath of a string of lawless acts, and heads on a freewheeling path from Paris out through Italy and back. Along the way he encounters all manner of refuseniks; from those turning to militant communism to those happy to drop out and blaze on. There's a sense that they're all already lost; living lives off-the-grid or on-the-lam, disposed from their old Parisian milieu and scattered like seeds to the wind. There's a far stronger sense, for contemporary audiences, that their fight is already lost; that the battle against encroaching capitalism and American imperialism was never really waged, let alone won.

Assayas just spent five-and-a-half years bringing his epic portrait of the infamous terrorist Carlos to screen, but After May has none of its same flirtations with genre; the thrillerisms found there - and in Boarding Gate and Demonlover - left far behind. There's a motif of fire - from Molotov cocktails to burned dreams to, finally, a fatal housefire - but, as much as the characters may play with it, the mise-en-scène shares not that fieriness. Early discussions find divisions in the ranks of rebellion -essential conflicts at peaceful vs violent protest, the place of art and pop-culture in defiance, etc - but the debates cool as the years pass. The film has a pleasingly ambling feeling to it, unfolding in unhurried episodes that move, from one to the next, with unexpected rhythms; the of-the-era musical choices - Syd Barrett, The Incredible String Band, Kevin Ayers, Nick Drake - adding feelings of sadness and weight, but never nostalgia. There's no tight narrative; lovers - like the doomed Carole Combes and the defiant Lola Créton - coming and going, even if they never leave Meyer's heart; friends both remaining virtuous and selling out, getting jobs and going to prison. It's inspired by Assayas's own youth, but the presence of Créton, the star of Goodbye First Love, means that the film is evocative of the cinema of the filmmaker's squeeze, Mia Hansen-Løve, and seemingly inspired by her spirit; the pictures almost working as his/hers portraits of the passage of time and the loss of innocence.